A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Last week, when I was cooking with a couple of friends at Cohousing,
Angela said: I wanna be in your blog.
Here goes. It was Stacia’s turn to focus the meal, and her menu included
roasted vegetable tarts, spinach salad, corn on the cob, baguette, and
pear-ginger crumble. Easy-peasy – and delicious.

Stacia & Angela with some of the tarts in
front of them. The oven gloves were donated by Vanessa. Thanks kiddo.

When The Sisters cook together once a month, there is more
to our time than just the food. There is the chat. We have such different
perspectives on so many things that there are always new insights. This time, during
our break, Angela read us the first part of an article that had struck her as
being quite important: Miracle
Boomeritis. This is what I mean about our different perspectives. The
Course of Miracles is not where I naturally gravitate, but because of our
friendship I get to be a kind of tourist in Angela country. This piece was well
worth reflecting on.

Then, Stacia read a poem Japanese
Maple by Clive
James, a poet who is terminally ill, and who wrote this reflection on being
fully open to every experience in the time that remains:

Your death,
near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in
fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
…….

It is worth reading the poem in its entirety, and the context of it as well.
As for my contribution, well it was spiritual, but only if you include the spirits
found in a cocktail glass. I have since heard that cocktails can be improved by
using Tibetan singing bowls while preparing them. I must try that. Anyway, this
particular cocktail was a concoction that Duncan and I had invented the
previous week when we were both baking a cake for 100 people to celebrate the
first ten years of Roberts Creek Cohousing:

Next time I make this, I
think I will ease back on the St. Germaine. Anyway, if I am going to do a blog
for Angela about our cooking day, then there had better be a few more cooking
pictures.

The irrepressible Peter had a joke to tell us while we were cooking.

It takes a lot of skill to make bratty comments, zingers actually,
while still focusing on brushing egg on the pastry.

Stacia & Angela with Stacia adding the goat cheese topping. The filling for the tarts was
made of roasted veggies and bacon, and then they were topped with prosciutto and finally cheese. The roasted yellow beets were a great addition – we parboiled them
first before skinning them. Creamed cheese was spread on the pastry before the
veggies were put on top. Excellent tactic. Some of the ingredients came from
the Cohousing gardens. Always a blessing.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

In November 2012, I walked up and down dozens of rows of
graves in Hong Kong’s Happy Valley graveyard, but had little luck in finding
what I was seeking. In my backpack, I had a copy of Ken Nicholson’s The
Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery, and was
looking for several of the family graves mentioned in Patricia Lim’s Forgotten
Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery. Unfortunately, when
I tried matching the maps with the relevant reference numbers, nothing was a
fit with what I could see on the ground. I was about to give up, when I spied Paul
Harrison and Kwok Mei Wah in the distance. I had met them both when I had given a
talk a few days earlier to the Royal Asiatic Society. Lovely people.

Kwok Mei Wah at work in Happy Valley Cemetery.

From our initial chat, I had learned that Paul worked as a conservator. He also knew a lot about the graves that were maintained by the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission. As I approached, I could see that the two of them
were surrounded by an assortment of pails and rags and other implements of
their trade. They dropped everything to help me. Apparently, reading the maps upside
down can be decidedly misleading.

In a future post, I will share more of what I learned from
Paul about the CWGC graves in Hong Kong, but for now I will stick with the
story of Charles James Bolton, and the grave of his daughter. It was that which
got me curious to learn more about them. (Recently, he also worked on a couple of dozen non-military Armenian and Russian grave markers, the work being funded by the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. Perhaps I will see them on another visit to Hong Kong).

For those who have been following my posts, you will know
that Louisa Caroline Bolton was a daughter of Captain Dare of Singapore, and
hence a sister of Amelia Dare, who in turn was the wife of Sir Thomas Jackson,
the central focus of my research. On my web
site, I have posted a chart: Mentions
of BOLTON in the Far East in themid
to late-1800s. This post takes the story of Captain Bolton and Louisa
Caroline Dare one step further.

It is worth knowing that their infant daughter, Mary Louisa,
died in Hong Kong when Thomas Jackson was in his mid-20s and was also living
and working there, first at the Agra Bank and then at what we now know as HSBC.
This means that Thomas would have met his future sister-in-law, Louisa, long
before he moved to Yokohama and met her younger sister Amelia. The social class
that they all belonged to was so small, there is virtually no chance that they
could have missed each other, plus they were close in age.

It is always easier to dig up nuggets about men in this era,
so it is no surprise that there were some bits about Capt. Bolton available in
various archives. He had received his master mariner’s
certificate on 22 December 1862, at the age of 33. In An Anecdotal
History of Old Times in Singapore, published in 1902, he is mentioned in the context of other family
members:

Mr. Dare died in London, 50 years of
age in 1856. He had a family of nine children, one of his daughters married Mr. William Ramsay Scott;another
Captain C.J. Bolton, very well known and a great favourite in Singapore,
who commanded Jardine Matheson & Co.’s
crack opium schooner, and when steam came, the Glenartney. He is now living in Essex.

The Glenartney,
was a three masted, screw-steamer launched on March 13th,
1869. It had been built by William
Denny and Bros. at Dumbartin, Scotland and was owned by Robert Jardine and the
Union Steam Ship Company. It was lengthened in 1875 by an additional
63.6 feet, which may not have been prudent. Six years later, on August 30th,
1881, it struck some rocks about 4 miles off Quoin Point, Cape Colony. When it
attempted to reach Simonstown unaided, it suddenly sank. I do not know who was
at the helm, but unfortunately 236 of those were on board died, while only 36
survived. The two words ships and sinking are all too often found in the
same sentence in this era.

Mark Sherbooke also found a news release indicating that Louisa Caroline Bolton had a hand in the naming of the ship:

LAUNCHES
- On Saturday, Wm. Denny & Brothers launched an iron-screw steamship of
1700 tons. The machinery, of 300 H.P. nominal, will be fitted up by
Messrs. Denny & Co., on the direct-action surface condensation principle.
The vessel was named the “Glenartney” by Mrs Bolton, lady of Captain Bolton,
who has superintended the construction. The Glenartney is the property of
Messrs. Jardine, Mathieson & Co. and intended for their trade between
Calcutta and China.Monday March 15 1869.The
Glasgow Daily Herald,

The Reiver was another
of Bolton’s ships. Like the Glenartney, it
also traded in opium and other goods, and
also sank, or at least as Mark
Sherbrooke points out, there is an
indication in the Jardine Matheson archives that the clipper was “lost” at some point before 26 November 1868.

There must have been a successor ship
to the Glenartney because six years
later, in 1874, an article in The
Illustrated London News Vol 65 says
that the Glenartney won the race to
deliver the tea from China to England. They did it in 44 days. Apparently, Bolton
was not the captain for that voyage. Coincidentally, a future Glenartney
was the ship that Dowager Jackson sailed on when she departed from Hong
Kong on March 31st, 1965 after participating in the 100th
anniversary celebrations of the founding of HSBC. She had a marvelous time in
Hong Kong, enjoying her usual abundance of G&Ts when she was hosted up on
The Peak. Thankfully, that iteration of the Glenartney
didn’t sink.

We do know that Bolton had a long and
profitable career with Jardine Matheson that lasted long past the sinking of two
of the ships associated with him. Their archives
are full of his letters from such places as Amoy, Whampoa, Shanghai, Siam,
Malay and other ports in the East Indies and China Coast. They also include his
marriage settlement:

An envelope containing
a marriage settlement agreed between Charles James Bolton of Hong Kong, master
mariner, commander of the S.S. 'Reiver'; Louisa Caroline Dare of Singapore,
spinster; and William Keswick and Edward Whittall, whereby, in light of the
intended marriage between Bolton and Dare, Bolton assigns his leases, stocks
and shares, and various other interests to Keswick and Whittall in trust, 22
February 1864.

Charles and Louisa would have met at least a year before
their marriage because on the 16th of March 1863, Louisa’s brother, John Julius
Dare, brought her and other members of his family up from the Cape to Yokohama in
the Jardine Matheson clipper-steamer Clan
Alpine, another of the ships captained by Bolton.

Mary Louisa was Charles and Louisa’s first child. On both of the 1865 and 1866 birth documents
for her and her younger brother, Charles, their father was listed as: Master
Mariner, Commander S.S. Reiver, and the
family was described as resident in Hong Kong.

A mere nine months after the death of Mary Louisa, Charles
George was born in Singapore. Given Bolton’s profession, this was a not
surprising location. Also, Louisa had deep family
roots in this city where her father had long operated as a ship’s captain and
chandler, with many other business enterprises on the side. Singapore was also
where her younger sister, Anna Maria Dare, married her husband Whitworth Allen
a few years later.

The steamer was a fine large vessel and the
commander Captain Bolton an extremely dignified and cultivated Englishman whose
regularity punctuality and vigilance we had good reason to admire Some
three months before the good captain had
lost his wife and a little daughter on the voyage from England to Calcutta
both were buried beneath the waves A dear little son had outlived the poor
mother who had been brought to the much afflicted father by his foster mother
and was now on board with him The sweet child was only five years old and his
innocent jokes and games served to while away many an hour and I became very
fond of him

This is a perfect fit with the notes by
Amy Oliver Lloyd, one of Sir Thomas’ daughters. According to her, Louisa
had died at sea, along with an infant daughter, sometime in 1870. With a few
more dates, Mark has been able to pin down the dates of these two deaths even
further.

According the June 1, 1870 edition of the Hampshire Advertiser Country Newspaper, the
P&O’s Delta sailed for
Gilbraltar, Malta and Alexandria with those who were leaving for India, China
and Japan boarding on Saturday May 28th. Built in 1856, it wasn’t a
new ship, but was still swish enough that a year earlier, it had ferried official guests from Marseilles to Port Said for the formal
opening of the Suez Canal. The passengers on this sailing included Mrs. Bolton, two children and servant (not all of the 75 on board were
mentioned).

Although shipping records show that Louisa then boarded the
P&Os Mooltan at Suez bound for Calcutta, only one child is mentioned as accompanying her on that leg of the voyage.
It seems that Violet died before reaching Madras. We do know, according to the London
and China Telegraph issue of August 15, 1870, that Louisa must have died within
a month of the death of her infant daughter:

DEATHS -
BOLTON – On the 1st July, on board the P. and O. steamer Mooltan, on her way to Calcutta,
Louisa Caroline, the wife of Charles James Bolton Esq., commander of the Glenartney steamer.

Meantime, Bolton had
been sailing the Glenartney between Hong Kong and Calcutta via Singapore. When he arrived in Calcutta, possibly not yet knowing that his wife had died, he now had
a 3 ½ year old son to take care of, his only living child, plus he had to set
sail again. On July 21st, the Glenartney
left Calcutta with Bolton at the helm. Who fostered the young Charles George
Bolton until a year and a half later when we hear of him again in Margaretha
Weppner’s voyage? There is still more to learn.

As Marke Sherbrooke points out, the sad thing is that that after Captain Bolton departed on the Glenartney’s
maiden voyage, he and Louisa never saw each other again.

MORE QUESTIONS:

·Was Charles James BOLTON related to John and
Thomas Bolton of Manchester who exported textiles to the Far East in a company
named Bolton and Barlow? See: Barlow Family Business
Chronology. It seems likely.

oAn Anecdotal
History of Old Times in Singapore: The firm of Syme
& Co. commenced in Singapore in 1823 In 1856 G.M. Dare was a clerk. J.C.
Bolton[NOTE: This is not Charles James
Bolton] was a partner in 1858. Afterwards
he was Chairman of the Caledonian Railway and MP for Sterlingshire. (NOTE: Robert
Jardine was also a partner of this railway then)

·Who did Louisa stay with in London when she gave
birth to Violet? Friends? Extended family? Was it her intention in living there
to avoid the circumstances which had led to the death of her first daughter in
Hong Kong?

NOTES:

·Julia Mitchell, the 2nd wife of
Charles James Bolton lived in 1901 at Bocking
Hall, Bocking, Essex, an address which is on the same census page as that of John
English TABOR of Bovington Hall. TABOR was a 1st cousin once removed
of Albert Maitland TABOR, husband to Thomas JACKSON’s daughter, Kathleen.
Bovington Hall is also where Albert Maitland TABOR died, so it is not a far
fetch to suspect that Uncle Charles James Bolton kept up connections with his
niece Kathleen McCullagh TABOR long after the death of his 1st wife.
Thanks to Mark Sherbrooke for catching this as well.

·If the age of death given in the
transcription of Mary Louisa’s grave-marker is correct, then she was born
August 30, 1865. On the other hand, her baptismal certificate gives a birth date
of August 27, 1865. Unfortunately, there is vegetation obscuring that part of
the inscription in my photos. Is it possible that the stone mason misread
"14" for "11", and then engraved "eleven"? That’s
a common error.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".